As viewers turn on the television, they may switch through popular channels only to have their screen fill with commercials, episodes, music videos or movies showing artists and actors as objects selling clothes, lyrics and simply, the famous, worldwide subject — sex.
Recently, however, television not only is talking about sex, but it is talking about safe sex much more than before.
A survey of more than 1,100 television programs indicates TV is including more messages about safe sex than it was a few years ago. About 26 percent of shows have more safe-sex messages. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the percentage of TV shows portraying sex has risen from 10 percent to 14 percent.
We see this issue of sex escalating on television, but also among the real world. On MTV, the recent season of the hit reality-TV show “The Real World” showed how one of the roommates thought she was pregnant from another roommate.
Sex also has become part of a selling technique in songs. A research from the American Academy of Pediatrics reports 75 percent of videos tell a story involving sexual imagery. Obviously, sex also is confronted every day in the music industry as well as on music channels. This may show that even though the media have put in some effort to educate, some still only educate about the pleasures and the idea of sex.
As people flip through newspapers and magazines, models also appear nude or with only small pieces of clothes covering them. Research shows 42 percent of print articles cover sexuality. There are sex stories and columns, varying from health topics to just mere sexual experiences. Web sites also have had an increasing amount of sexual implication. A national survey found that one in four kids between 10 and 14 years old had encountered explicit sexual content. These studies evidently show the issue on sex is widely spread throughout America and is questioned not only by adults, but also by children.
It comes to one question — why in today’s generation should young adults be exposed to this? America and its people are becoming too comfortable and surely are not thinking for a better and safer future.
Other than children being exposed to sex and teenagers becoming pregnant, television also has found itself publicizing other worries.
In 1997, HIV infection was the sixth-leading cause of death among African-American males and fifth among African-American females. It was also the seventh leading cause of death among 15 to 24 year-olds. Hispanics and African Americans are responsible for 58 percent of adolescent males with AIDS. Other sexually transmitted diseases that are being spread increasingly are gonorrhea and chlamydia. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, young adults are more likely to contract these diseases if they they have more than one partner and have unprotected sex.
These facts are amazing, considering this is a recent occurrence. In just a matter of decades, people increasingly have been exposed to these dangerous outcomes from unprotected sex. Young adults now not only are exposed to sex, but to fatal diseases.
These problems concerning deaths may be linked to one idea: unprotected sex. Although the media have had a great amount of responsibility in advertising sex, one thing they are resisting is advertising information about contraceptives. According to Mediascope Issue Briefs, networks said contraceptive advertising would offend the moral beliefs of a great amount of their viewers.
It is ironic these networks do not want to air information about contraceptives because of viewers but are willing to air other sexual innuendoes. How is it that advertising information about contraceptives invades peoples’ beliefs, but explicit sexual content does not?
Morals and ethics go beyond the use of contraceptives. It questions the intentions of the people behind the networks, and how this one problem can affect many others. If one of the jobs for the media is to talk about things such as sex, then another job is to educate the public about it.